Yes, I'll Never Be Your Crown Princess! is another isekai title, but hear me out before you run screaming into the night – it's from a type of isekai that we don't get very often in print releases in English: raunchy for an intended female audience. It isn't the absolute first of its kind, because earlier this year Renta! started releasing Game World Reincarnation – Sex on the First Night, but unlike that one, I'll Never Be Your Crown Princess! isn't set in a game world, or any kind of fictional place the heroine knew from her previous life. It's just a plain old fantasy world, and one with some traditions that make the story possible.

The main issue facing Lydiana, familiarly known as Liddy, is that her father wants her to marry the crown prince of their kingdom, but royalty is allowed to be polygamist, and that's not something that works for her. She's not keen to be one of any number of wives and concubines; she wants to marry for love and be the only wife her husband has, and that's in no way guaranteed if she marries Friedrich, the crown prince. But there's one other piece of marrying into royalty that can work in her favor: while a woman's virginity isn't a big deal for anyone else, she who marries a royal must be a virgin. Liddy doesn't know why this is, but it does offer her a very easy out: if she has sex before the engagement is made official, she won't be able to go through with it.

What's very refreshing here is that Liddy has no qualms about her plan. Yes, she's never had sex in this current world, but she was sexually active in her previous one, so she doesn't see it as anything taboo or unladylike. That's an attitude that we don't often see in manga, even racier stories with a female intended audience, and that Liddy is so calm about all things sexual makes her stand out a bit from other similar protagonists. For her a one-night stand is a means to an end, and she's got all of her precautions in place; it's a plan, not a whim. Interestingly Friedrich is more squirrely about sex, as we find out in the two chapters told from his point of view; as a member of the royal family, he apparently has a very high sex drive, and he's not happy about it. It's made sex feel like a chore to him, and he's tired of just going out to masquerades, picking a random unknown woman, and sleeping with her to get it taken care of. He wants sex to be something more special, and it's not hard to see that he and Liddy may actually want the same thing: a relationship built on mutual feelings. It's just that Friedrich doesn't quite know how to express it.

Canny readers will have figured out that the key word in all of this is “masquerade,” and that's where all plans essentially go to die in the volume. It turns out that there's more to this “virgin bride” thing than Liddy was aware of, and that comes back to haunt her in a way she never imagined. It also sets the story up to feel very much like an illustrated bodice ripper novel, touching on, essentially, the trope Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan call “the magic hoo-ha” in their (surprisingly thorough) book of romance criticism Beyond Heaving Bosoms. Simply put, once the hero has experienced sex with the heroine, no one else will do, and this is often combined with the idea that he's not only more keen to marry than she is (a way of giving her more power in their relationship), and therefore must work hard to convince her that he's worth it. In some ways this isn't surprising, because this is an adaptation of the novel of the same name, and as is common with manga versions of light novels, there's an included prose short story in the back of the book. But it also makes the whole thing familiar to readers of historical romance novels, which raises the possibility of it appealing to people who don't normally read manga.

There's only one sex scene in the volume, but it's a chapter-long one, and definitely feels a bit racier than Outbride, the inaugural title in the Steamship line, and it does go further than any of the guys in that other book do with their lady. This may also have a more general appeal since the romance tropes are somewhat more mainstream in our current environment, suggesting that Seven Seas is going for a wide variety of romance subgenres in this line, which can only be a good thing. The art can be a bit stiff at times and poor Friedrich looks a little cross-eyed on occasion, but it's easy to read and smoothly set up. All in all, if you're a fan of historical romance or just want something a little hotter than your average English-language manga is prepared to deliver, this is a good bet – it's fun, makes good use of its tropes, and features two characters who both aren't stupid and are willing to go for what they want.